Abstract:

In this study, it was aimed to understand and compare the perceptions of gifted and other students about fairy tale characters and heroes through their drawings, writings under them and observations of the researcher. Additionally, it was aimed to evaluate the implications of the findings in terms of Turkish courses and its objectives regarding the development of critical thinking skills, cultural background and universal point of view. In the study, participants were consisted of 20 gifted and 20 other students of 7th grade. As research method, descriptive survey was used and data were analyzed using SPSS. Percentage and frequency values were given by using chi-square test to examine the data in terms of variables. We analyzed; general characteristics of children's drawings of fairy tale heroes, whether they drew human heroes or non-human/imaginary/fantastic heroes, whether or not they include other objects and persons in the pictures, whether their heroes/characters were depicted in action or not, whether they drew good or bad characters/heroes, their characters/heroes’ situation regarding power, whether they drew universal or local characters etc. The findings of the analysis were examined and evaluated comparatively between gifted students and others to understand whether they differ in terms of their perceptions of fairy tale heroes/characters and whether there were any differences according to their gender status. The mean of ages of the children included in the study was 10.5 years. It was found that 82,4% of the gifted and 63,8% of the other students devised and wrote about male heroes. While the gifted children had 70% of the heroes with super power, the other students had 40% of them. 78% of the gifted children were found to portray heroes of universal characteristics, and 64% depicted heroes with local characteristics. It has been concluded that the heroes of the children of both groups were generally male and had extraordinary power. Moreover, we concluded that they have a limited sense/perception of fairy tales and heroes, their perception and critical approach may be developed through more reading and analyzing fairy tales by using different points of view, different kinds of approaches and textual analysis methods.

Keywords:

Fairy tale heroes, perceptions of students, critical thinking, culture.